my realization wasn't even about religion per se. i just realized, at age 15, that there were no gods. i was raised a secular jew. i still go on high holy days when i am well enough and i LIKE the sermons, but you have to know that there is no fire and brimstone in judaism. i liked the sermon about recycling! i don't have to take the god thing literally.

g

It didnt' happen all fo a sudden. It was/is a gradual process.

It came in layers. It started with 2 contradictions in the bible (and then grew by leaps and bounds). A perfect god couldn't have written and imperfect book. Without the book, no jesus. My religion? A good way can't be built on an evil book. After you take away everything MAN says that god says...god is very quiet.

I believe it was 2nd or 3rd grade, during catechism, the nun teaching the class was telling stories that just didn't make sense to me. When questioned, she flustered, got angry, and couldn't answer. I wanted to believe, but it wasn't making sense. By 4th and 5th grade, the nuns had labeled me as a "doubting Thomas" and my parents stopped making me go to catechism, so I was never "confirmed" in 5th grade, like my brothers and sisters. I felt that gave me license to be non-religious and think for myself. I was the only one of my 4 siblings who didn't get married "in the church" as an adult.

Over the years throughout my childhood, after being told I had a guardian angel watching over me, I couldn't understand why that angel, or God himself, wasn't protecting me from things going on in my home that were clearly wrong.

I came to realize that this guardian angel was really my conscience and that God was likely a metaphor for all authority. I disliked authority, as I could see it was often a selfish entity with an agenda which wasn't always fair. I learned to think for myself, trust my gut feelings more, and slowly unlearn the concept of blindly following authority.

Took a long time to be free of the prison of patriarchal authoritarian rule, because it was so deeply ingrained in society all around me, and I felt alone in my departure from religion, but access to library books questioning religion, shining a light on a more scientific view of the world helped with my transition in my twenties and thirties, and then when I could access the internet right from my home on a borrowed computer, I realized there were others questioning and discussing the transition online. I found my lifeline!

I can remember having questions about religion ever since I was a kid. Experiences in my childhood made me question how God could let bad things happen? How is it we go to church but don't follow through on the basic tenets of love, peace, acceptance, compassion, etc? How can I, a child, make a promise to never lie again? Very confusing. I never understood war, and how God could be supportive. The nails in the cricifix came when I watched the Zeitgeist movies for the first time. A long time coming but many connections were made that finally put me over the top.

It was my early 30s and this community me see all that religious stuff was harmful in ways I didn't think of.

I was around twelve years old and I had a moment where I thought to myself that the entire thing sounds like a fairytale. All the bible stories really didn’t help either. They all seemed more like the bedtime stories in books. Later in 8th grade, when I started in science class and we were learning about biology and evolution, it made so much more sense to me than the story in the book of Genesis. I asked my teacher, who I will not name, if there were any books I could read outside of class to learn more about evolution. He wouldn’t refer anything to me so I decided to research it. I found a copy of “The Blind Watchmaker” in my local library. By the time I was done reading it I wanted more. I can’t place a specific moment as THE moment but between the age of twelve and fifteen, I had stopped believing. I didn’t “come out” until I was twenty-two.

Same. My father was agnostic and I only ever went to church when we were visiting friends at Easter or Christmas, or going to a wedding or funeral. It has always seemed rather creepy and cultish to me.

It hit me all in an instant. I was 11 and wanted to be a priest when I grew up. A teacher said he went to a different religious ceremony each week to hedge his bets. I thought to myself. There are virtually infinite religions and if only one is right, my odds of finding/being that one are 1/infinity, aka zero. At that point I prayed to Good instead of God and never looked back. If there is a God and it’s not evil, I think it’ll like me. If not, I’d rather suffer with the righteous than live in bliss with the select.

At around 10 years.

Same here

11-2-1986, 2:31pm

They started late with my indoctrination for the catholic church (at about 6 years old). They really tried, and they really put a lot of effort into making it a good experience.
One of the things they taught me was that God helps those in need, loves everybody, and sees everything because he is everywhere.
Well my childhood... let's say I was in need. So I was thinking that: If God helps those in need and I need help but he doesn't help me, he might not exist because if he also loves everybody and sees everything, he cannot miss the fact that I need help.
I was around 8 or 9 at the time.

I choose to start not believing in elementary school, when they started going over the Crusades and Dark Ages. There’s no way something as important as chronicles and timelines should be snuffed out because of a quest for a “God”.

Wow, I guess I'm just slow! I spent 51 years believing in a god. Four years ago, having already lost my father and brother, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and that just opened my eyes. I have experienced such a freedom from bondage and judgement and actually am more hopeful overall. So many people say religion set them free and broke the chains of things like drugs or alcohol. For me, atheism set me free and broke the chains of religion. Better late than never, I guess.

When I was a teenager and began to apply critical thinking to reading the bible.

When I started to be sexually abused on camps by trusted church members and clergy at 10. By the time it stopped at 16, I was an atheist.

So many responses, thank you for sharing everyone

In college, I took a great books class. During junior year, we read and discussed the bible (not all of it, but several books--Genesis, Exodus, a few others I don't remember). We had two professors who would lead our discussions, and one was a well known Calvinist (he was some kind of very minor radio personality). Our discussion ended up on Satan, morality, and absolutism, and I had questions--I was basically using the Socratic method on myself to figure this out, but using the professor as a sounding board. I asked the professor if evil was basically disease, destruction, dysfunction, chaos, disorder, etc. He said yes. I asked if Satan was absolutely evil. He said yes. I asked if that wouldn't mean Satan was a being who was absolutely diseased, disordered, destroyed, dysfunctional, chaotic, etc., which implies a being who doesn't (indeed CAN'T) exist. He said no, that one being could be absolutely evil, and Satan was that one being. That really made no sense, but I accepted it for the sake of argument and then asked, well if God is absolutely good and Satan absolutely evil, then they are in a stalemate forever (there could logically never be a winner or a loser, as they would by definition absolutely counterbalance each other forever). The Calvinist professor said that was true, except for at the end of time when God throws Satan in the lake of fire. DING! I was an atheist. I almost heard an audible click or bell in my head. It was just a bridge FAR too far. I couldn't even accept what he was saying for the sake of argument...not even on a "story logic" level--and suddenly I couldn't accept ANY of it for the sake of argument. It was just totally crazy nonsense. It wasn't even a very good story (I was a lit major).

When I was a teen, it was my brother, actually, who made me realize this. He watched a lot of videos on the internet, like the AmazingAtheist and videos where people anaylzed the horrific stuff in the bible. From there it was me seeing stuff about inconsistencies, how the ark can't possibly hold all those animals, etc. Like a slow buildup of realization and knowledge.

Coming of age and knowing I was going to be drafted for the Vietnam war; watching Walter Cronkite nightly news on the body counts. Kept asking questions, absolutely no logical or free thinking responses. I was drafted, did not go to Vietnam but kept questioning, “Why?”

It's never made sense to me. My Grandma read Aesop's Fables and Ancient Greek Myths to us when we were kids. Relgion seemed just like those stories growing up. I never went to a church though, so I didn't have adults in my life pressuring me to believe in fairy tales. Now I watch debates between Christopher Hitchens and Matt Dillahunty and Richard Dawkins and I'm entertained! These religious people seem so absurd

In second grade, I posed an heretical question after an assertion by Sister Mary Contusion that nobody but Catholics go to heaven. I asked if cavemen who were good could go because no Jesus yet. She said no. I mentally called bullshit.

I have a hard time quantifying it since religion always "made sense" to me because in my sect of Judaism we said that God wasn't Gandalf on a cloud in the sky controlling everything but that power and divinity and idea of creation is a force that's inside all humanity. Which allowed me to consider myself both agnostic and a Jew. The first time I ever found myself seriously questioning religion and arguing was July 2014.

I started thinking it was ridiculous when I started questioning things. I would research an argument a theist said and found all the holes in the argument and in other arguments. Eventually everything that had me believe in a god fell apart and I slowly stopped believing.